Lucy Mangan: 'It can only be by thinking yourself entirely responsible for your own fortune that you can think of all those who are poorer, less successful or less independent of the state as personally responsible for theirs.' Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

So, three days to go until Christmas! We have all descended on my parents' house for the duration.

All the presents are under the tree, whose 30-year-old tinsel is still twinkling gamely. The turkey is turking. Everything is ready and the house is filled with warmth, anticipation and the cries of delight from my mother as she watches her grandson sit down, stand up or turn his head "so cleverly!" to the right or left. If he's not doing anything else, she'll sit and admire his great talent for blinking, while I sit on the sofa eating chocolates and catching up on a year's worth of reading.

And I think – not for the first time – we are so lucky. You couldn't ask for more than we've got. Peace, plenty, health, happiness and enough money to ensure that, unless utter catastrophe strikes, these things can't be suddenly taken from us. We would have the energy and the means at least to put up a fight.

We are so lucky. A moment's honest thought tells us how little of everything we have is truly down to our own efforts. So much of our easeful passage through life is down to being born at a good time and in a good place – a developed nation enjoying the fruits of late western capitalism, even if they're not dropping quite as ripely and juicily to the ground as once they did – and into a socioeconomic and ethnic group that rarely suffers, even as much as it should, when the general going gets tough.

There are things to be personally proud of, of course – my parents have worked hard all their lives and loved their children even harder – but it is the broader setting that has allowed the rewards of that labour to be fully realised and the effects multiplied. And the cycle will, as long as we don't go deliberately and far out of our way to disturb it, continue for me and my husband with our child. Providing, of course, that he survives the coming realisation that not everyone in the wider world will applaud his talent for exercising basic motor skills.

It makes me sit and wonder: do our politicians, our policy makers, bankers and other millionaires, billionaires and tax-avoiders (none of which, of course, are mutually exclusive categories and quite a few of which are exactly the reverse) never feel this way? Do they never have moments when the weight of their astonishing luck makes them buckle at the knees and fall to the ground in gratitude? I suppose not. It can only be by thinking yourself entirely responsible for your own fortune that you can think of all those who are poorer, less successful or less independent of the state as personally responsible for theirs. Thus they deserve punitive policies and sanctions designed to remedy their immorality and sloth.

A moment's honest thought, that's all it takes. I wager that you'll agree, because I wager you have them yourself. It would take an inhuman, almost sociopathic degree of arrogance and lack of imagination not to. So, dear leaders, if you could give us that moment – pop it in the national stocking, why not? – it would be the best present ever. Merry Christmas.